


vale of tears

by liberteas



Series: BSD Pacific Rim AU [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), 文豪ストレイドッグス | Bungou Stray Dogs
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Character Study, M/M, Pacific Rim AU, Relationship Study, Soukoku Pacific Rim AU, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:33:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26301235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liberteas/pseuds/liberteas
Summary: Pacific Rim AU. The story of how Dazai became a Jaeger pilot, how he sees the men he's loved, and how Double Black took on its broken, dysfunctional form.So even though they were still forced to live in each other’s minds in the drift in the missions that followed, still taking down kaiju, still working seamlessly like two souls in one body, their hearts grew distant, until there were worlds and worlds of hurt separating them, a bottomless chasm that stretched on without end.Prequel to "in you, i saw the heavens".
Relationships: Dazai Osamu/Nakahara Chuuya (Bungou Stray Dogs), mentioned Dazai/Oda
Series: BSD Pacific Rim AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1910974
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	vale of tears

**Author's Note:**

> edit: revised and added a section about Chuuya's motivations + Dazai's carelessness about risky behaviours

_4 years ago_

Dazai is not a hero. He had never claimed to be one, and he _doesn’t_ want to be one. He uses people like toys and lies to them without the slightest shred of remorse. When he spars in the dojo with the other trainees, he’ll hit below the belt to win if he’s forced to. He’s not a good person, but you didn’t need to be a good guy to take down kaiju. You just needed to have the brains and the fearlessness to face down a towering alien monster without peeing your pants in your robot suit.

Dazai fits both of these criteria. He’s eerily calm in the face of danger, and scarily analytical even in the most nerve-wracking of situations. He’ll take risks, but he doesn’t really care if his bets don’t pay off. He wants to die anyway. It’s a win-win situation for him. Some people might have called him ballsy, but he’d probably just call it a conscious lack of concern for his own wellbeing. 

As it turned out, he had the perfect combination of stupid recklessness and keen calculation that the pilot academy was practically salivating for, so despite his less than pristine background, they turned a blind eye to his criminal records and his unsavoury past and shoved him into a forty-foot death machine of steel and wire to save the world.

He beats the entire cohort in the kaiju simulator with the same ease with which falsehoods roll off his devil’s tongue. Even before he’d graduated from the academy, they all knew he was going to be piloting for sure. 

Oda is two years older than him, and almost as good as Dazai. Oda had an uncanny precognition that always seemed to be _right_ , and that along with his quick thinking helped him along quite a bit in piloting. It comes as no surprise when he’s selected along with Dazai to pilot the next Jaeger to be delivered to the Yokohama facility.

Dazai worked well with him, but Oda had been the kind of man who could drift with anybody, and even after he found out through the drift that Dazai had feelings for him that he couldn’t reciprocate, he still treated him kindly, as if nothing had changed. Dazai loved him even more for that.

But within months of them piloting together, Oda had been reassigned to a new Jaeger with a man called Ango, and Dazai sent to pilot with a boy his own age called Chuuya. With their experience, they were expected to pass along their skills to the junior pilot newly assigned to them. But Chuuya was no normal newbie recruit. He was a genius in his own way, with an unconventional fighting style, and he was the perfect foil to Dazai’s quick wit and ballsy battle plots.

Despite their increasing fame as _Double Black_ , the godly demonic duo, Dazai resented Chuuya. Part of it was jealousy, that Chuuya, surprisingly, clicked pretty well with Oda. Both were the dependable, steadfast, responsible type, similarly fed up by Dazai’s antics, and both had a penchant for alcohol. To Dazai’s chagrin, they became fast friends indeed.

The other part was a fundamental difference in their attitudes toward life. Drifting with Oda had been natural, easy as breathing, comfortable even. Drifting with Chuuya was a different sort of experience. Though they understood each other, wired similarly enough that they could settle on the same battle strategies and plan of action wordlessly within seconds, they had this undercurrent of tension running beneath the amenable surface partnership, a bitterness that both of them refused to acknowledge or resolve. Dazai hated Chuuya because he was a naive little brat, someone who truly believed in stupid things like loyalty and honour and brotherhood, the very antithesis of himself. Chuuya hated him, too, for being an underhanded snake, deceiving _both_ friend and foe indiscriminately. He also hated him because Dazai never saw him as an equal, only as a useful tool and a manageable partner. Dazai treats him like the random people you get dumped with by the teacher in a school group project, but not a friend, and the mutual disdain residing in them fed off of each other, fermenting into a stale, rotting hatred.

Dazai resented Ango too, but at least he did not need to drift with him every time the kaiju attacked, did not need to share every privy little secret with him against his will, all of which Nakahara Chuuya had access to every time they were connected by that dastardly mind-link.

* * *

"If it weren't for Kouyou, I would never work with an annoying mackerel like you," spat Chuuya, once he disengaged himself from the drift-suit, his fringe sopping with sweat. "That stunt you pulled could have gotten us all killed."

"Well, it didn't," said Dazai. "My risky plan paid off and the kaiju went down." 

Chuuya's mouth was turned down in an unhappy frown.

"I can't die, not yet," muttered Chuuya. "Kouyou still needs me."

Dazai remembered Chuuya's sister, Kouyou, glimpsed in bits and pieces through the drift. She was skeleton-thin, the artificial port on her stomach stark against her skin, all sorts of tubes sticking out of her frail frame.

"I know about the miracle anti-cancer drug they purified from kaiju blood," says Dazai. "But you know, if we do our jobs too well, if we kill _all_ the kaiju off, there'll be nothing left for your sister."

"One extra day alive is one more day I get to see her and talk to her and hold her hand. With the way the war efforts are going, it's not like we humans stand a fighting chance anyway."

"Fair enough," Dazai admitted, smiling faintly, as if the thought of the humanity's extinction amused him.

"Look, just don't pull another stunt like that again, got it?" said Chuuya, exasperated.

"I make no promises I can't keep," replied Dazai, and dodges the punch Chuuya throws at him.

If Dazai _had_ to name something he liked about being Double Black, he'd say that the only perk of piloting with Chuuya was the extremely good hate sex. It was really good. Fantastically good, even. Every time they fucked Chuuya would leave vicious scratch-marks and bites all the way down his back, and wring out orgasm after orgasm from Dazai’s boneless, exhausted body. They’d rut like animals in heat, doing it flat on the table, sitting on the windowsill, folded in half on the sofa, all sorts of places, in all sorts of ways, leaving crumpled condoms and tissues strewn all over the place, leaving the room looking like a small typhoon had hit it. Nothing in Dazai’s sex life had been as exciting as what he had with Chuuya. 

* * *

The fun and games ended when he lost a battle for the first time in his life, and he realised: he was no longer the same Dazai who had nothing to lose. 

He had been completely prepared to discard his own life, but he had forgotten that every piece on the chessboard was a liability now, that his life wasn’t the only piece at stake. All along his luck had been extraordinarily good, holding up in every wager against impossible odds, even in the worst of missions. But only one failure was needed to destroy everything.

They had set up a trap, having _Double Black_ faking an injured right arm, a false retreat, in the hopes of luring the kaiju to follow them to the shallower parts of the coastline, where they had already prepared explosives and heavy artillery ready to take the kaiju down.

Oda and Ango’s Jaeger, _Flawless_ , would stand guard and offer axillary support if needed.

Well, the plan worked, mostly. 

_Double Black_ takes a direct hit from the kaiju’s spiked tail, and lets their right arm hang limp, feigning a retreat towards the bay, as they’d planned, and the kaiju _did_ fall for it, pursuing them, also as planned, and they were perhaps a kilometre or so away from the range of the ground artillery, when disaster struck.

A second kaiju erupted from nowhere, unexpectedly, rearing up through the water’s surface, and striking right into _Flawless’s_ defenceless back. _Flawless_ was underpowered and unprepared, but _Double Black_ was too far away to help, and Dazai and Chuuya themselves were burdened with fending off the first kaiju. By the time the roar of the cannons had stopped and the smoke had faded away from blowing up their kaiju to smithereens, there was nothing but radio static and Ango repeating, oh god, oh god, oh god, again and again, like a prayer, distorted voice crackling from the unbroken side of _Flawless’s_ cockpit. 

No one had expected for there to be _two_ kaiju. There had been double events, popping up sparsely at first, but increasingly frequently, in other parts of the world, but Dazai had assured them his calculations showed it was highly likely that it would still be a single even this time round.

He was wrong, and his mistake cost Oda his life.

Chuuya was never one who could take the death of a comrade well, and he blamed Dazai. He knew Dazai blamed himself too, and that he was being unfair to Dazai, but the pain was too raw, and Chuuya had never been the bigger person, so to speak. So even though they were still forced to live in each other’s minds in the drift in the missions that followed, still taking down kaiju, still working seamlessly like two souls in one body, their hearts grew distant, until there were worlds and worlds of hurt separating them, a bottomless chasm that stretched on without end.

* * *

Dazai stares at the picture in his hands, a weathered old photo of himself and Oda taken four years ago.

What then, was love? Was it to know someone as well as yourself, to be able to communicate your every thought, your every desire with one flicker of your expression, to understand and be understood unconditionally in return? To know each other’s mind and body as well as your own, and place your life in the others’ hands without a second thought or a single doubt? To move and breathe as one, to see the world with the same eyes, needing no words to smite your foes in perfect synchronicity? To invent an entire language without words that only the two of you could speak?

Or was it to hold so much tenderness and affection for someone that your heart seemed to quiver under its very weight, that you could somehow imagine yourself striving to be the better man they deserved, despite all the rottenness in you. That the warmth of their smile could melt your ice-cold heart that you had once thought dead. That just to hear their laughter you would have brought down entire kingdoms for them. You would never have imagined that they could have slipped in the chambers of your heart, and filled it so full of love that you couldn’t stop the tenderness from overflowing in your eyes whenever you looked at them.

Or was it to see the ghost of someone everywhere no matter where you went, to close your eyes in the sunlight and still see his image etched behind the red glow of your eyelids. To remember him always, to hear his voice and feel his presence when the cold nights alone grow too dark and too lonely, a silent companion immortalised in the beauty of memory, locked away with the days of old in that small hidden part of yourself that you would never open up again.

Dazai’s loved maybe three men in his life, and each love leaves a different flavour in his mouth.

Outside, Atsushi calls loudly for him to wake up for breakfast, and shoving the picture back into his breast pocket, he opens the door and plasters the smile back on his face to meet his protégé.

**Author's Note:**

> i would have added this as a separate chapter to my previous pacrim AU work, but i felt like it worked better as a standalone work more. this one-shot takes place entirely before my other work in this universe, "in you, i saw the heavens" linked in the same series. you can check it out if you wish.
> 
> also i hope the last three descriptions of dazai’s love for the people in his life is clear about which paragraph refers to which person...
> 
> i shout into the void about bsd here:  
> tumblr @libertea [here](https://libertea.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter @_liberteas [here](https://twitter.com/_liberteas)


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